1. Field
One or more embodiments of the present invention relate to a hierarchical based three-dimensional (3D) image processor, method, and medium, and more particularly, to a hierarchical based 3D image processor, method, and medium performing the hierarchical based processing with ray tracing.
2. Description of the Related Art
Three-dimensional (3D) image processing can be used for generating two-dimensional (2D) images, for example, similar to 2D physical images displayed on a television, a monitor, and the like. Such 3D image processing may represent a virtual 3D space where any of a number of virtual 3D objects are positioned, and simulate images as if they were being viewed from an observer's viewpoint according to a relationship between a corresponding virtual ray and the virtual 3D object.
The 3D image processing may be divided into processes that model the virtual 3D space and the virtual 3D object and processes that extract images obtained when the modeled virtual 3D object is projected from the observer's viewpoint. The process for extracting images projected, from the observer's viewpoint, from the virtual 3D object may be referred to as 3D rendering.
Ray tracing is one example technique for the 3D rendering.
In the physical world, rays of light from at least one light source may be reflected and/or refracted as they strike an object, resulting in changes in direction and/or intensity of the rays. These changes are thus observed as an aggregate of at least one changed ray, from the observer's viewpoint.
Ray tracing may be a scheme for inversely tracing a trajectory of a ray in the physical world, and trace a process in which rays are generated from the observer's viewpoint; a generated ray may be reflected and/or refracted when striking the object to thereby cause a change in the ray. Ray tracing may, thus, trace, for each set pixel making up a plane display at the observer's viewpoint, changes in the at least one ray generated from each of the pixels to thereby identify the appropriate color to be displayed for each of the pixels.
In general, the number of rays and objects may be increased in order to provide a more realistic 3D image using ray tracing, and thus 3D rendering using ray tracing may require a significantly large amount of computations.
In addition, in conventional ray tracing, when a predetermined termination condition is satisfied, with respect to tracing of a specific pixel, the tracing process is terminated and a subsequent pixel may be traced, i.e., there may be no correlation between separate tracing processes.